I am using SVN for my group projects and I have seen Foundation. As of now I do not have time with more projects since I am currently working on:
1. A university design project, we are doing an XNA game.
2. An F# assignment
3. A personal XNA project.

Thanks for the update Emblis, definitely understandable! After finding out today that my backgrounds artist has decided to quit with no notice, I'm feeling stretched a little thin myself. (Not part of this project, but adds more work on another front) Hopefully, you can still follow along and offer suggestions here and there!

"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

Hey, even if everyone thinks they're really busy, and can't take on a project like a game like this right now, I think it is still probably worthwhile to do the screencast thing. It's something that (for you guys, anyway) shouldn't take a lot of time, and I think you'll find it useful, now or some day down the line.

I think the first step is to so a "soundcheck" of sorts. I need to make sure that this thing is going to work like I think it will, but I'm actually pretty sure it will be sufficient.

Then after that, we can schedule the actual event for whenever works for anyone who's interested. (And the people who can't join can pick up the video later, or get the content in tutorial form, which I'm currently working on.)

Probably on a Saturday some time, when fewer people are at work or at school. I know there are people who come here from around the world. Finding a time that works best for everyone might be tricky.

I'd love to be able to get this set up for this Saturday, but that's only 48 hours away. Probably the week after might be better. (Which also puts things three days after the originally scheduled start date for the game. But maybe that's OK.)

If guess this thread is the place to tell me whether you're interested or not.

I'm going to tentatively schedule this for 10:00 AM Mountain Standard Time (where I'm at) this Saturday, December 21st, 2013. This would last 60 minutes (I'm not planning on going even a minute over, but that also means I'll be starting on time.) If 60 minutes is too long, then join for 20 or 30. I'll be covering the most useful stuff up front.

There are a lot of reasons that this could get rescheduled, not the least of which is what time works for all of you guys. At this point, I only suspect that there will be about 2-6 people, so it should be reasonable to shift the time if you speak up now. I know weekends around Christmas can be busy for a dozen different reasons.

I've tried to pick a time that works well world-wide, since there are lots of people here from all around the world. This puts the overnight hours anywhere from Hawaii to Bejing, but it ought to be a time people will actually be awake in North and South America and across Europe.

10 AM MST is 9 AM Pacific Time, 12 noon Eastern Time, and 5:00 PM in London. I can't convert this to every single possible time zone, so I'll leave that to you if you are elsewhere, but if you want somebody to double-check your timezone math, send me a private message or an email and I'd be happy to do so.

Like I said, if a better time works, speak up now and we'll change it. If this time works, I'd love to get a confirmation from anyone who thinks they'll join so I have an idea on how much stage fright I should have. :)

I'll be following up shortly with technical details of how this is going to work. (No, you shouldn't need any special software to join.)

I haven't heard anyone commit to this yet. I was hoping to get some replies by this point. There doesn't need to be a lot of people (1 is enough) but I'm not going to do it if no one is planning on showing up. :) If you want to join in online, please let me know in some shape or form some time in the next day. If it doesn't work out, I can just postpone it for a while.

My best bet as to what this will be like is something like this. Anyone who wants will be able to jump in and start watching a live streaming video of my monitor, and you'll be able to hear what I'm saying as I walk you through the process. It won't be like a conference call or anything. I won't be able to see or hear you. Instead, if you want, you'll be able to chime in in a little chat window with comments and questions. At least, I think that is what it will be like. I still need to test out the technology before making a formal commitment.

I've now had two people tell me via email that they'll be there at the time mentioned above, so I think I'm going to go ahead and do this thing.

Emblis, if the time is really at 2:00 AM for you, that clearly won't work out. Check out my earlier post and see if that helps. If it's a bad time for you, and you'd attend if it were at another time, I can still change the time (or do a second event 10 hours later or something). Of course, you already said that you use SVN. So while I think learning about Mercurial would be meaningful and valuable to you, I also think it will have more meaning and value to some of the other people that haven't used another form of version control before. Don't feel like I'm trying to pressure you or anything. It really is just an offer. I won't feel bad if you don't/can't watch. Seriously, it would be no problem.

PiscesMike, you had expressed interest in this earlier, but I haven't heard anything from you in a while. Do you think 10:00 Mountain Standard Time (UTC 17:00/5PM) on this Saturday, the 21st works for you?

Windwalker made the suggestion to me that I could post a countdown somewhere, which would help solve the time zone issues. I think that's a great idea, and I'll try to pull it off.

Date: Saturday, December 21st, 2013
Time: UTC 17:00 to 18:00
Location: http://www.twitch.tv/rbwhitaker
Topic: The following agenda is tentative. It could (and probably will) change. I'll be covering the following in order, until time runs out:

What is version control?

The problems that version control fixes.

The basics of version control (creating repositories, comitting, updating, reverting)

Centralized vs. distributed version control

Why Mercurial instead of SVN, Git, or something else

Where to download Mercurial and TortoiseHg

Using Mercurial for version control

Ignoring files

Diff

Hosting a Mercurial repository locally

What is BitBucket?

Creating a repository on BitBucket

Pushing to and pulling from BitBucket

Forking repositories on BitBucket

Tagging and branching

I suspect this is way overscheduled. I doubt we'll get to all of this. We'll just stop when the time ends. If there's still a lot left, and people are still interested, maybe we can schedule another event a week or a month from now.

In theory, I should be able to save the stream for later and let people come back and review it after the fact, so if you miss it, you wouldn't truly miss it, but I'm not sure if that's going to work.

Also, keep in mind that it has become clear that there will be a lag between the time it is recorded and the time it is streamed. This lag will be anywhere from 20 seconds to 40 seconds, most likely. While there will be a chat room, where you can type in questions, etc., that kind of delay means it will be pretty tough to actually have a conversation. So questions, yes, conversation, not so much. I'm really disappointed in this. Apparently, it's a new "feature" of twitch.tv. (If you know of any good alternatives that don't have this problem, I'd love to know for next time. I think at this point, I'm committed to trying out twitch.tv.)

Lastly, if you still have concerns about the time zone thing, I'm planning on streaming a countdown timer of sorts for quite a while (probably hours) before. The countdown might be on-again off-again tonight as I play around with some things, but if you ever see it, it will be accurate.

If you have any questions about this at all, please respond to this thread or send me an email or a tweet. I'll try to get back to you quickly.

I'm actually really excited to try this out. Hope to "see" some of you there!

Hey RB! If you like, we could probably use Ventrillo or something similar to conduct real time conversations. We should all be able to run that in the background with no major issues… I've used it plenty while playing WoW and whatnot, and it seems to have both low overhead and latency.

On another note, running a little behind on getting the Asteroids clone started. My bad, been caught up in some issues involving overseas ordering of some personal products. Could we get a new "Asteroids" thread going here in general for that?

I'll aim to get up the framework classes of the clone up by tomorrow. Thanks RB!

"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

I'll install Ventrilo. It might be worth doing something with it, but I would suspect that that audio chat would be out of sync with the video, so we couldn't do something that involves both simultaneously. I'll go play around and see where that takes us.

Yeah, let's get an Asteroids thread going! I hope to be a bit more involved this time around. Of course, collaboration will be much easier with some form of version control, so it may be pretty good timing for all of this.

I see your Karma is now up to "medium". In theory, that should mean you can post links in here. For my sake, and for the sake of Emblis (who expressed frustration about that at one point) when it makes sense some time, would you be willing to post a link somewhere in the forum? You should be able to do that now without being stopped…

Well… that didn't go according to plan. It looked like there were three people who tried to join, one of which I assume was me. I apologize for all of the technical problems. It honestly was working earlier. I guess I've just had another encounter with the Law of Live Demos.

To summarize where to go next, I'm planning on putting the content that I was going to present into tutorial format. In fact, I was planning on having it ready today. I've still got more work, but that will be coming soon.

Sorry, once again to those of you who tried to participate but couldn't, either from the switch from Twitch, or from just the video that kept cutting out. I take responsibility for both of those.

I think the live tutorial idea has potential, but let's not try that again until I can sort the technology out… OK? :D

@Emblis, sorry that you couldn't watch either stream. I didn't know Flash was going to be a problem, but it's good to know for future reference. For what it's worth, the video capture software I use records in .mp4 format. This should theoretically be a format that you don't need Flash for. I don't know why hitbox and twitch would both convert to Flash on the fly, but I'm sure they have their reasons. On the bright side, I might be able to take a recorded stream like this and upload just the mp4 file somewhere, and people who can't see Flash would be able to view it after the fact.

@PiscesMike, don't worry. You didn't miss much. Hopefully we can try this all again sometime, after I sort out the technical problems. But I'll have the text tutorials online soon, so you guys can learn the information that way.

Flash needs to die, HTML5 is fully capable of replacing it. All flash today is a security hole that sucks up computing power by running the code in a plug-in. It is an old solution to an old problem, HTML5 is both faster and more secure.

There is very little I need Flash for today, hence I do not consider it worth the effort with the constant out-of-browser updates, crashes and slowdowns.